Engineering2Empower

Engineering2Empower is a team of faculty members and students at Notre Dame who envision a world where all families can afford a safe, dignified home. E2E facilitates access to housing, primarily by seeding an integrated process that empowers local entrepreneurs to deliver engineered urban housing in the free market within informal economies. By operating through the University of Notre Dame, the team has the advantage of interdisciplinary environments ideal for identifying comprehensive solutions to development challenges, commercialization pathways, and diverse intellectual, computational and laboratory resources.

E2E believes that lasting solutions to infrastructure problems in the developing world can only be established through true (and bold) innovations that can build capacity and empower the local population. Failure to do so leads to temporary solutions that provide only a simple patch to the problem and ultimately perpetuate the dependence on foreign aid. By contrast, E2E aims to help the local communities take ownership of these solutions. This process starts by listening and understanding all of the different dimensions of the problems these communities face, extending to issues beyond the infrastructure problem itself, such as cultural preferences, market constraints and local capacity. Through this process, a solution can be developed with help from the population it is ultimately trying to serve.